PCs depreciate at an alarming rate and three year old equipment is already outdated.

You spent your entire tax return on a new workstation system just three years ago, and now you are struggling to keep up with the demands of today’s graphics applications. You hop on eBay to see what you can sell your old system for to help pay the way for a new $3000 rig, and you’re horrified to see your PC is worth roughly 10% of what it used to.

Exponentially worse than a car’s depreciation, a computer’s depreciation is truly depressing. Technology is moving at breakneck speeds, and every advance a PC manufacturer makes ratchets down the worth of what you just bought. What was once recently the hot thing in graphics cards costing $350 is now worth $30 on eBay, at best. A system worth $3000 three years ago will be lucky to go for $300 now.

But you don’t have to rid yourself of your PC to get a better performing system next to your desk. For years now most PCs have been built with interchangeable parts, all conforming to some sort of standard. While it is true standards also change, they do not with the lightning speed of the components themselves. So if you want to boost your performance, simply upgrading parts of your old box may be all it takes to get appreciable results with minimum cost.

Instead of shelling out a king's ransom for the latest models, you can perform PC surgery and boost your computer's performance.

Before you go reaching for your pills, upgrading a PC is really not complicated. Anyone who exercises some care can install just about anything to beef up their system. Most components even come with explicit directions, to make the install process very easy. But what to get? What sort of components will boost an older system to be a better performer?

Well, that’s a complicated answer, and it all depends on how far you’re willing to go to boost your system. The simplest and most effective upgrade of course, is to replace the core guts of the machine, the motherboard, CPU and memory to contemporary specs. This is, of course, a bit costly and can be complicated for the novice to try, so we’ll stick with the simple and cheap upgrades we can do right now.

Memory
The most effective simple upgrade can be adding more memory. Today’s Windows XP Home and XP Pro both require large chunks of memory. If you have upgraded to XP, and you have 256Mb or less you may have noticed degradation in performance. The obvious answer would be to buy more memory. For today’s systems I recommend 512Mb or higher. Some older systems usually max out at 512Mb or 1Gb, so it’s not much of an issue to get more RAM in your system. All you need to find out is what kind of memory your system supports, what it has in it now, and how much higher you can go.

A simple way to upgrade is to increase memory with Crucial's PC-133 SDRAM DIMM.

www.crucial.com’s Website has a nifty feature where you can search to find the memory you need by the exact make and model of your PC. More than likely, for systems two or more years old, you’re looking at PC-100 or PC-133 SDRAM DIMMS. These are older technologies and so are pretty inexpensive, usually at about $90 for an additional 512Mb. If you have anything under 512Mb, going up to this level will definitely net you a noticeable improvement in most applications, especially in graphics work. Going to 1Gb will be very helpful to those who do a lot of video and high-end graphics work, and keep a lot of applications open at the same time.